Ex-HUD Aide Didn’t Defraud U.S., Lawyer Says

WASHINGTON — Former Housing and Urban Development aide Deborah Gore Dean “made a mistake” by taking a $4,000 loan from a consultant to the housing agency but she did not conspire to defraud the government and then lie about it, her lawyer said Thursday.

“Is she the devil incarnate? I don’t think so,” defense lawyer Stephen Wehner said in closing arguments.

But prosecutor Robert O’Neill said that the government never characterized Dean as evil.

“We are only saying she misused her position. She misused the public trust,” O’Neill said in his rebuttal. “And when it was found out, she lied about it.”

Dean is on trial in U.S. District Court, charged with conspiring to defraud the U.S. government, accepting an illegal gratuity and lying to Congress when it looked into the awarding of HUD money--12 felonies in all.

The jury received the case Thursday afternoon and immediately recessed because one juror became ill. Deliberations were to begin this morning.

Dean was executive assistant to HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr. in the mid-1980s, when the agency was doling out federal money under its moderate rehabilitation housing program.

Wehner said that Dean accepted $4,000 from consultant Louis Kitchin to decorate an apartment before it was sold, then wrote a personal check against insufficient funds to pay him back.

“On the evidence, she made a mistake and she tried to correct it,” Wehner said.

But O’Neill said the apartment had been sold months before, and that Dean took the loan because she had run up credit card debts.

The debts needed to be cleared up because the FBI was conducting a background check on her nomination for an assistant secretary’s job at HUD, said the prosecutor.

“You can take her testimony and throw it in the garbage where it belongs,” O’Neill told the jury of six men and six women hearing evidence in the five-week-long trial.